Peel off every label then open every can in the pantry...

a

man

can

be either a closer or an

opener

neither

makes

much difference.  He is a

peculiar

creature, a body invaded with 

urgency

naked he looks

like

a different man

someone

strange

isolated

a man waiting

on

the sublime eventuality of the

nothingness

Fear of the Written Word

Years from now, all of this will seem inconsequential.  It probably will be.  It probably is now.  The urgency to write this memoir is the urgency to dig when one is buried alive, when one wakes up suffocating, inhaling the dirt of one's own shallow grave.  Driven by nerves, one digs.  Driven by nerves, one writes.  The matter of survival is much more important--between gasps and cries--than readership or one's next meal.  The uncertainty of tomorrow is easily eclipsed by the threat that exists today.  

(Even the bitter skeleton that was my aunt wore her seat belt religiously driving to and from her third round of chemo-therapy.)

But safety has never served me well.  Caution is the beginning of claustrophobia (imprisonment from without); and claustrophobia is the beginning of paralysis (imprisonment from within).  And weather wearing uniforms or orange vests, the protectors are a saintly lot who believe in nothing less that death.  Real dangers exist but they are metastasized by too much imagination, too little science, by my abandoned patience.  I am a hundred holes shot through the white flag.  Surrender, Dorthy.  (or--as God is my witness--Oz will Burn!)

Compulsory Service

Compulsions are just elaborate games we create for ourselves that are designed to distract us and devour up time.  There is no crime in this self-servicing system to maintain equilibrium.  It is, biologically, a functional adaptation to the problem of mind.  And the idea of it being born of dysfunction arises from mid-century mores which favored industry over creativity and conformity over freedom.  

True "an issue" might be identified in the disorienting tendency of compulsions to achieve a kind of autonomy in which the compulsive forgets that the behaviors are sourced internally and experiences their imperative rather as the manipulations of some external force, a dark god exposing their flaws to a ravenous world.  Even this conspiracy is a testament to individual creativity.  

The story we tell about our own personal loss, our unique damage, is a symphony we forget to take credit for.  The locus of creative power lies in the individual; and when one is able to connect with this idea (partly by jettisoning the egotism of self-deprecation), compulsivity and its varied expressions become notes dancing on the staff.  One can dissect them, cleft palate and signature, with glistening precision and detail the findings in catalog and book.  But what will you say of that necessity, sleepless at the end of the day?

Compulsion

What is the function of a compulsion? In organizing the minutia of experience and by insuring predictability for the senses, a compulsion creates (from the four walls of the imagination) the staples of security and comfort. Certainty is purchased by intervention, some sort of deliberative act that assumes magical association while performing the very real and "beneficial" task of demonstrating the potency of identifying one's own self as the locus of--if not power--at least choice. One can engage with a variety of tactics, but when infected by compulsivity and its aggressive, "present-tense" thinking, one leaves one's self, incomplete. The delusion is obvious but the satisfaction becomes irrational; one wants the idea of control since one knows that actual control is impossible. Simple, and perhaps inelegant, this statement is both empirically and intuitively "true." The addiction model makes a mistake in presuming progress in moving behaviors when behaviors whether they be perceived as negative (an addiction) or positive (a hobby) are the attachments to identity that detach one from the great ellipsis (AKA God). There is no logic in supplanting one compulsion with a second and calling this success. The trouble with compulsion is not contained in the specific acts and rituals that manifest but rather in the spontaneity and breadth of experience that, in mistaking fear for armour, the individual loses altogether. Rather than anticipating the demise of one's ambitions, one does well (and privately, much better) to cogitate on "movement" as opposed to "decision." We can learn more by listening to the potentialities and challenges in other histories or by sitting with another in silence while being mutually unburdened by that silence or, perhaps--having had the foresight to not rehearse anything, to stumble, ungoverned, into some situation that, at least for the moment feels both like "control" and "freedom."

Someone with OCD uses his Franklin-Covey Daytimer to plan out his days.

Obsession builds on obsession; compulsion is derived from compulsion. Each interlocking piece clicks into the next. An authoritarian necessity replaces the discomfort of time. Each hour is crowded. Each minute is mapped. And all that is is ordained by the regimen and its rhythms.

One of the illogical antonyms that evidence the lie: on the one hand, there are the rituals of "obsessive-compulsive disorder"...on the other, there is the idea that its "important to create a schedule and keep to it." One angle is tainted with pathology the other is illuminated by success. There is nothing to do but giggle a little, laughing at the tyrannical truthiness of all the various memes.